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WOMEN IN
MEDICINE

Elizabeth Blackwell

First Woman Doctor in the United States

By Jaime Pankowsky, MD

Throughout history, women had taken care of sick people and for treating sick people. She also took care of pregnant women and
provided childbirth care as midwives, but never as trained or licensed described in detail the childbirth care they received. But other than
physicians until well into the 19th Century. Nuns usually admin- midwifery, later centuries saw very little participation of women in
istered hospitals and hospices during the Middle Ages and the Ren- the medical profession.
aissance, but they were concerned mostly with the salvation of the
patients’ souls in view of the lack of medical knowledge to help cur- By the 18th and early 19th Century, young women were discour-
ing diseases. aged, and sometimes flatly forbidden, to learn medicine or any other
scientific endeavor for that matter. The so called reason? It was be-
In the 13th Century, Hildegard of Bingen in Germany, a nun and lieved that women who studied sciences in general and medicine in
later abbess of her convent, developed recipes and formulas of herbs particular, caused the blood that should go their uterii to detour to

14 San Antonio Medicine • October 2016